Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies

INPUTTING MULTILINGUAL TEXT

Not all keyboards are created equal. If you purchase a computer in France, for example, the keyboard is configured for French-language input. To get an idea of what a French keyboard looks like, Microsoft offers a visual keyboard, as shown in Figure 12.9. Notice the addition of accented keys as well as the positions of the characters; as you can see, the “qwerty” keyboard layout that English users are familiar with is hardly a global standard. Microsoft offers more than 40 localized operating systems that support a wide range of character sets and keyboards. Given such a wide range of keyboards, you might wonder how to input non-English characters using a U.S. English keyboard. Fortunately, there are a number ...